Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Tolstoy

  • Famine and illness in War and Peace

    The Pavlograd regiment had lost only two men wounded in action, but famine and sickness had reduced their numbers by almost half. In the hospitals death was so certain that soldiers suffering from fever, or the swelling caused by bad food, preferred to remain on duty, dragging their feeble legs to the front, rather than…

  • Deserving but unrecognized: the forty-first seat

    Marshall A. LichtmanRochester, New York, United States The Nobel Prizes Each year on December 10th, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, the Nobel Foundation and the Swedish royal family recognize the individuals deemed to have made the greatest achievements in chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine, and literature; and the Norwegian Nobel Committee recognizes “the person…

  • Placebo effect or care effect? Four examples from the literary world

    Pekka Louhiala Raimo Puustinen Finland   It is common knowledge that patients may exhibit improvement following an encounter in which no specific drugs or effective medications were prescribed. Indeed, even fictional doctors have often been depicted as knowing that their patients may require no active drugs and that their mere presence, their advice and encouragement,…

  • Tolstoy: insights for doctors and other humans

    Maarten Wensink Southern Denmark   Tolstoy in May, 1908, photographed at Yasnaya Polyana by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky It is a testimony to the genius of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy that a fine selection of concepts later arduously acquired over the course of decades can be found in the first of Tolstoy’s great novels, War and Peace.1 Although Tolstoy was not primarily…

  • Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and the five stages of grief

    Katharine LawrenceFlorida, United States Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. “Vermiform appendix! Kidney!” he said to himself. “It’s not a question of appendix or kidney, but of life and . . . death. Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and I cannot stop it.…